Global Consciousness Project

Registering Coherence and
Resonance
in the
World

"The Global Consciousness Project, also known as the EGG Project, is an international multidisciplinary collaboration of scientists, engineers, artists and others continuously collecting data from a global network of physical random number generators located in 65 host sites worldwide. The archive contains over 10 years of random data in parallel sequences of synchronized 200-bit trials every second."

Research in Motion’s BlackBerry devices “have been failing both at inopportune times and at an unacceptable rate,” the agency wrote in a procurement request issued last week.

NTSB spokesman Eric Weiss, citing procurement rules, declined to name any specific problems the agency has had with its BlackBerry phones. RIM (RIMM) has suffered a few high-profile outages, including a global, three-day disruption last year.

“The NTSB requires effective, reliable and stable communication capabilities to carry-out its primary investigative mission and to ensure employee safety in remote locations,” the agency wrote. “Due to performance issues with the blackberry [sic] devices, the NTSB desires to transition to a different device.”

RIM declined to comment specifically on the NTSB’s criticisms.

“We have 1 million government customers in North America alone who depend on BlackBerry, and more than 400,000 government customers worldwide upgraded their devices in the past year,” the company said in a written statement. “We are committed to the mobility needs of government agencies around the world and will continue to meet these needs with BlackBerry 10.”

The NTSB isn’t waiting around for BlackBerry 10, the next-generation platform that RIM plans to launch on Jan. 30. It intends to switch to Apple’s (AAPL, Fortune 500) iPhone 5 running on Verizon’ (VZ, Fortune 500)s network. That’s the only device that is both available from its existing wireless vendor and is “currently supportable by existing staff resources,” the agency said.

The NTSB has a staff of around 400, not all of whom have agency-supplied phones, according to Weiss. Its switch won’t put much of a dent in BlackBerry’s sales, but the NTSB is just one of a growing wave of government groups moving away from the device, which was once ubiquitous in Washington’s power corridors.

Most ominously for RIM, the U.S. Department of Defense is planning to relax its BlackBerry-only policies. The agency posted a procurement request last month for software to manage at least 162,500 Apple and Android mobile devices. DOD hopes to add them to its IT mix in the near future.